Safety of people, equipment, facilities and the environment is becoming increasingly important in industrial operations. This is not just because of the highly publicized accidents that have occurred over the past few years, or even for altruistic reasons. Rather, it has becoming evident that the safety of an operation is directly linked to its profitability. Industrial executives are very concerned over the safety and operational integrity of their operations, recognizing that increased profitability potential that is realized through more effective safety management that is really starting to turn heads.
For decades industrial professionals have recognized that the cost of an unexpected event, such as an explosion, is very high in terms of injury, loss of life, equipment damage, facility damage, environmental damage, business interruption, brand recognition and stock value and insurance. Industry has responded to this high cost through functional safety programs, such as installing safety instrumented systems to detect pending unsafe conditions and automatically taking the correct response. These systems have proven to be very effective at the avoidance of predefined unsafe events and certainly represent a huge step forward. But cost avoidance of unexpected events represents a small piece of the overall potential profitability impact that results from an effective safety control solution. The “cost avoidance” perspective tends to be easy for business executives to ignore because they are lulled into believing that unsafe events will hit other businesses, not theirs. Unfortunately, this tends to be an all too human thought process for all kinds of similar events which seems to have served to inhibit capital spending on safety and operational integrity improvement initiatives.
The primary aspect of the business that all executives have a keen interest in is profitability. Executives are willing to invest in approaches that measurably improve profitability. What may not be totally clear is the impact operational and functional safety control can have on profitability even in the absence of costly unsafe events. It has often been difficult for Environmental, Health & Safety (EH&S) leaders to get funding for the capital projects they propose because the “payback” is not obvious. But the payback for a systematic approach to operational integrity and safety management and control is huge. Industry needs a new way of thinking about, measuring and improving safety and operational integrity.
One of the inherent characteristics of many manufacturing operations and processes is that there is a chance that unsafe events could take place leading to undesirable consequences. The potential undesirable consequences include damage to plant equipment, injury to personnel and sometimes even loss of life, environmental damage, facility damage and resulting higher insurance costs. Therefore, controlling the safety of these operations is one of the key concerns and a high priority for most manufacturing companies.
Over the years a number of safety improvement approaches have been employed in industrial plants, such as safety audits, environmental audits, process alarming, constraining operator actions, fail safe instrumentation and the use of automatic safety shutdown systems. These have all been progressive steps forward in safety improvement, but a more systematic approach could realize much better results.
Without a systematic approach to safety management many plants have tended to err on the conservative side when approaching safety and operational integrity. For example, engineers have a tendency to set value limits and process alarms in zones they know to be safe in all circumstances, thus constrain at all times the process for the worst case situation. Operators tend to operate in a manner so as to avoid alarms which drives the plant to an even more conservative position from a safety perspective. The result of this has been reasonably fairly safe operating environments that are typically underperforming from an efficiency and profitability perspective. Controlling safety is very important, but so is profitability and efficiency. Any effective and systematic approach to safety must also be directly tied to efficiency and profitability.